Most of the time and money spent on an information technology (IT) system goes towards repairing and maintaining the system, rather than the initial purchase of the system. In particular, the costs of supporting and maintaining the software used in an IT system increase as the complexity of the software increases. Thus, there is a need to develop methods and systems that can analyze software programs and help identify software defects in a timely, cost-effective manner.
There have been previous attempts to improve the efficiency of software analysis. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,202,199 describes a system and method for remotely analyzing the execution of computer programs. The system enables a software program running on a user's computer to be monitored and then analyzed by a computer associated with the developer of the software program.
In the system and method described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,202,199, software analysis programs are installed and maintained on each software developer computer that is used to analyze software running on the user's computer. In addition, the only data collected at the user's computer is execution trace information, so a person debugging a defective software program must obtain a copy of the source code or relevant portions thereof by some other means. The need to give the person debugging the software access to the source code raises security concerns as well.
Thus, it would be highly desirable to reduce or eliminate one or more of these problems to provide simpler, less cumbersome, yet advanced software analysis capabilities.